IRELAND
Galway Advertiser
Editorial
February 07, 2013
In an Ireland in which the only colours were black and white, when even the sunshine seemed a distant grey, hope was a rare commodity. And for those who were robbed of their innocence by circumstance and robbed of their freedom by a lack of compassion, days like this week must have seemed a million years away. When life seems on the verge of beating you down, you fall back on family, friends, beliefs, and authority figures.
To be rejected and betrayed by all four is a nightmare from which ten thousand young Irish women must have felt they would never awaken. When these young women found themselves within the walls of the Magdalene Laundries, not many of them knew exactly why they were there. It was not a prison, but it had four walls through which it was impossible to pass. It was not paid employment, because there was no pay and no pension. And so they were led to believe that it was some form of moral punishment for a perceived wrong they had done. And lest they got any notions about the rights of this wrong, they were subjected to emotional abuse to strip them of their pride, their dignity, and of their right to call themselves decent Irish women.
The story of the Magdalene Laundry is not something that is looked upon with pride by any community, even here in Galway where it is only in the last decade that there has been any semi-official acceptance that what went on was callous, conceived, co-ordinated, and concealed.
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